


new scientist

by thisparticularlight



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-24
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-01-25 19:00:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18580648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisparticularlight/pseuds/thisparticularlight
Summary: "Greg Lestrade has taken Mycroft Holmes out for a drink - a small miracle by itself, such a milestone standing proudly above a relationship that until now has barely been spoken aloud - and is currently stirring the ice in a gin & tonic he’s been nursing for forty-five minutes, and Mycroft is thinking to himself, for perhaps the first honest time, that he doesn’t care how this ends."





	1. given enough time (mycroft)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not usually one for author's notes but it does seem worth all of our while to note right up front that if you're not into exposition + family dynamic exploration as a mystrade-y side dish then this is probably NOT going to be your jam lol

When Elisabeth Holmes told her oldest son, aged seventeen, that his father’s declining health meant that their family would very likely downsize their home after he left for Cambridge, the first place he went after their conversation was the bench underneath the magnolia tree in their back garden.

Cigarettes, at seventeen, were a new thrill for Mycroft, though he suspected even then that they would follow him over years and miles, days and nights, loneliness and comfort. He pulled a cellophaned packet out of his jacket, looking around for a long moment before deciding that he was alone and taking a deep drag.

The smell of the tobacco winding up alongside the magnolia had a strangely centering effect, and as he breathed out, he reviewed the facts.

“It’s too much,” his mother had explained, eyes pleading with Mycroft to either understand or to deal with the pain on his own. “It’s too much to keep up. I can’t take care of your father and your brother and this enormous old house by myself.”

Which, under review, was in fairness likely a perfectly reasonable assessment. The Holmeses often described their home as modest, but the house, Mycroft conceded, was in truth enormous; seven bedrooms with all of the interior and exterior features accompanying a house built for entertaining.

His mother, he knew, had merely been asking him to understand. Instead, the way a seed finds itself planted before a long autumn, Mycroft had found a barb that would burrow into his skin and settle into his bones, making a home for itself for the rest of his life. As his mother had explained, he’d closed his eyes, the letters making up _by myself_ swirling in front of him to cross themselves out and then reveal themselves anew, rewritten: _without you_. 

_I can’t do all of this without you._

It is the first time he realizes: this is the cost of the leaving. And if the leaving will grow, spiraling outward throughout his life, then so, too, will the debt.

Mycroft, who had always had a knack for problem-solving but had never had a perfect grip on the boundaries of where his responsibility began and ended, had felt almost underwater while talking with his mother. He took another long drag from his cigarette and realized that the unique pain of threatened loss was blurring the boundaries of obligation into a picture that left him very unclear indeed about how to proceed. _I don’t know how to stop this from happening_ , he’d thought, closing his eyes against the idea as magnolia swirled around him. _I don’t know how to be helpful._

He found it a singularly awful sensation.

Certainly the neatest solution was to delay Cambridge for a year, to remain home and help his mother care for the estate.

_But I’d wanted to go so badly_ , some still-wild part of his heart shrieked, immediately silenced by the way that duty snuck up behind it and whispered back: _how dare you?_

His mother, earlier, had stared at him, the silence of admitting that she was no match for the encroaching untidiness of the Holmes estate threatening to swallow them both alive; it was ultimately this discomfort which had pushed him to respond.

“Of course,” Mycroft had said, without argument, and Elisabeth, who had clearly been bracing for a fight, visibly deflated. “I understand.”

“Mycroft,” she’d despaired, saying his name in the way that meant that she couldn’t understand what to do next.

“Mother, I _understand_ ,” he’d repeated, offering her impatient comprehension when even he knew that he was being asked for compassion.

_I didn’t understand how difficult it must have been for you, all this time_ , he thought to himself now, exhaling a long curl of smoke as his mother’s face swam to the front of his mind. _But then, how else would any of this have gone?_

“Mycroft, are you smoking?” Sherlock’s tiny voice called through the garden, pitched high enough for Mycroft to hear but low enough to avoid the attention of others.

“No,” called Mycroft immediately, crushing the cigarette out on one of his mother’s decorative stone platings as his younger brother slinked up next to him. “What are you doing out here, Sherlock? It’s getting dark. You should at least go back inside and get a sweater.”

“Came out here to check on you,” Sherlock responded. “And I’m not cold. I’m never cold.”

“How did you know where I was?”

“You always come out here to think. This tree is your favorite. I brought _you_ a sweater, by the way.” Sherlock looked at him meaningfully. “It’s getting dark, after all.”

“Well hello, then,” Mycroft had said softly, and took the sweater from his brother. The younger boy’s mop of curly dark hair blurred into the dusk as he’d settled next to Mycroft, touching his knee to his older brother’s thigh.

“You’re sad about us moving,” Sherlock announced, without preamble.

“Not sad.” Mycroft surprised even himself with the speed with which he had rushed to correct Sherlock. “Simply… contemplative. It has been our family’s home for a very long time.”

“But you’re going to leave soon anyway,” Sherlock pointed out with a tone that Mycroft couldn’t read. There was no follow-up; Sherlock did not say _and then it won’t be your home anyway_ or _but if we didn’t move you’d be able to come back_ or _even so there_. 

The memory of that single sentence has been studied over and over for decades in vain. Mycroft has never been able to learn the language, often wondering if that was the exact moment it began; the distance had always been there, probably since the day Sherlock was born, but at some point, Mycroft had stopped keeping pace and had one day been startled to realize he could no longer jump it. Mycroft, at forty, would be able to identify this quite precisely: there are many chasms characterizing his relationships, but this is the last time such a chasm had been allowed to grow without being monitored carefully.

“You’re right,” Mycroft had said, unwilling to speak anything else into the air in light of not truly understanding what his brother had said. “You’ll leave someday, too,” he added, bowing a little under their shared silence.

“Maybe,” Sherlock responded, with a lightness that had suggested that the very heart of him was not underpinned by the foundation of this home, this tree, these birds, the wallpaper, the small scorches and gouges and dings left on the dining room table from years of shared meals.

_He is eight years old_ , Mycroft reminded himself with a sharpness. _There is no reason to ascribe your sentimentality to him. He could still be anything. Anything he chose. Your strings will not serve him._

“Probably.” Mycroft’s correction was gentle but firm. “No one can see the future, but the balance of probability would suggest that you will leave, too. It’s nothing to fear.”

“Then why are you scared?”

Mycroft had looked upward then, thanking god and goodness for dusk and for the dark hair that fell into Sherlock’s eyes, letting his own face go unread. “Because I do not know what it will be like to leave,” he’d answered, finally, deciding to be honest with his brother and wondering whether eight years old was too young to recognize a gift in absence of glitter and ribbons. “Because I have never done it.”

_Because of the things I will leave behind_ , his heart had completed, and he’d thanked the same god and the same goodness for filters, knowing that honesty is a gift, but sentimentality is not. 

_I am not nearly half-prepared, but I will be good to you your entire life_ , he’d thought, then, and the unbidden declaration startled him with its fierceness as Sherlock moved closer to him. His brother’s breathing grew gentle as the two of them sat together in silence, watching night fall across the house where they’d both been born. He found himself desperately grateful for Sherlock’s proximity. _If I cannot love you properly through what I am, I will love you as best I can by sifting out that which will not help you. I will always do my best for you._

“I will miss you,” Sherlock admitted, sounding quite small indeed.

“I will visit,” Mycroft promised, and Sherlock tightened his hand across Mycroft’s forearm.

“I could even visit you, too,” Sherlock suggested, and Mycroft had been taken a bit aback by the way that his heart gripped the thought of showing his brother around a life he’d crafted for himself. “When you move to Cambridge.”

“Yes, of course you will.” Mycroft swallowed. “I will show you everything.”

+

“I don’t have to leave, you know. Would it help you if I stayed?” Mycroft had asked, the next morning, and Elisabeth Holmes set down a tea towel very slowly and looked her oldest son over for a long time before speaking.

“It would not help _you_ if you stayed,” she’d answered, finally, and then gestured. “So, no. Sit down, my love.”

He truly hadn’t known what he’d wanted her to say.

It was early in the morning, the sun throwing light all around the kitchen, and they were sharing a cup of tea, and he had been thinking how uncommon it was for the two of them to be alone together. He’d been thinking that the house perhaps did seem a bit big, especially with him planning to move out at the end of the year. He’d been thinking that his mother looked old; the thought, bright and jarring in its newness, wrenched something deep and painful inside him that he immediately folded up and put away, to be examined later.

He’d been thinking, he realized with a pang, that he’d had seventeen years to get to know her, on her own terms, and now, a month before he was due to leave, it was just occurring to him to learn her enough to miss her. 

“You are such a careful boy,” she observed, the lines around her eyes crinkling as she looked at him with a fondness that was nearly blinding. “You take such good care of each of us, Mycroft. I’ve never told you how proud I am of that.”

“Thank you,” he mumbled.

“But Mycroft, I… it would break your poor mother’s heart if you went through life thinking that it was your job to take care of your parents.” She smiled at him over her teacup. “I rather suspect that in time, Sherlock will become a full-time job, all on his own.”

It would take many good years, two good therapists, one good partner, and untold bottles of good scotch, but someday, Mycroft would look back and call that moment the anchor of his life.

“We are all born with so much,” Mycroft’s mother had continued, then, and immediately his head had indeed been flooded with images: the small town where he’d grown up; a sick father; a vulnerable brother; a kitchen with the same green paint he’d put up with his father when he was eight years old and which any prospective buyer would immediately paint over if they had any shred of sense; his mother’s Cambridge diplomas, hung up and framed in the study that she now used as a sewing room, repairing buttonholes and letting out trouser hems for boys who grew too quickly. “But along the way, we make choices. We can’t keep it all. It’s the saddest part about life, Mycroft. We have to be very careful about what we keep, and about what we set down in order to make room for it.”

When she’d reached for him, he’d moved to her, with an ease and a quickness that would suggest that he’d never been ashamed of the way he loved her.

“Please don’t think for a single second longer about not going to Cambridge,” said Elisabeth plainly, wrapping him up in her arms, and in that moment Mycroft knew that for however sick his father became, and for however much his brother might need him, he was always going to leave them behind. “Life will be a little trickier without you around, but it would kill me if it meant that you decided to stay here with us.”

“I don’t want life to be… ‘tricky’, for you,” he’d confessed, the way a person might confess a secret or a sin, and his mother had looked like her heart was breaking anew as she’d taken his face in her hands.

“It was never your job to give anything up for us,” she’d replied. “Your father and I will get by.”

He thought, again, about his mother’s framed degrees. _She is brilliant_ , his father had said, just last week at a luncheon: radiant, even then, with the joy of describing his wife. Mycroft hadn’t even known she’d studied mathematics until he was thirteen.

“You could have been anything.” His voice was strangled, but she had just smiled.

“Well, not _anything_.” She squeezed his hand. “But… yes, many things, probably. And in all of it, I got to be your mum. I assure you I wouldn’t have been able to dream up anything so wonderful.”

There are a million reasons that Mycroft Holmes has spent his life wishing he could love his parents better. The sincerity on his mother’s face when she tells him that even her brilliance could never have dreamed anything so rewarding as mothering him is first on the list. 

“I’ll do well,” he’d told her, not out of hubris but because he needed her to know. _You did well with me. I will do well for you._

“Be careful.” She brushed the curl out of his eyes. “About what you keep. Sometimes the choices are not easy.”

“I am careful, Mummy,” he’d promised, the love and the honesty springing so easily into his eyes because nothing could be more true, nothing in the whole world, unless maybe he’d told her why, told her: _I am careful because I love you too much, Mummy._

“I know you are, my Mycroft,” she’d whispered, holding him so closely to her that he’d let himself hope for the briefest moment that she’d heard it, anyway, and that the smell of magnolia would never fade out of his mind. “And I still worry so much. Isn’t that funny?”

He understands, now: the worrying, and the knife that a person wields when they use _funny_ to cover up _devastating_. It’s funny, too, to think that his mother, of all the things in the world that might bring Mycroft heartbreak over the years, had chosen to advise him to inoculate himself against _carelessness_. He wonders what she advised Sherlock. 

But then, he thinks, she’d done her best. Perhaps her best didn’t always shelter him, but she gave it willingly every time, anyway; what other choice does a person have? 

+

What other choice, indeed, he wonders now, pinching the bridge of his nose tightly in his fingertips reviewing the footage of his little brother, reaching up and disabling yet another camera. Mycroft’s never been sure whether Sherlock disables them because he doesn’t know that cameras are the only way left that Mycroft has to say _I love you_ , or whether it’s because he’s very aware indeed. He’s never been sure which feels less heartbreaking.

_It doesn’t matter_ , he tells himself, using all the same words that he uses for Sherlock when Sherlock needs them, and all the same tricks he uses on himself to convince himself that it’s okay that though they’ve both always needed reassurance, Mycroft is the only one who’s ever given it. _All hearts break._

What matters is what has always mattered: that Sherlock is safe, that he is well. And in this, Mycroft, however broken-hearted, is still a good older brother: as long as he lives, so, too, will Sherlock.

_Have you spoken to my brother recently? Might be a danger night. -MH_

The reply comes almost instantly:

_Ran into him at a scene a few days ago but not since. Will check in & follow up. -GL_

Gregory Lestrade is a man who texts back quickly. Gregory Lestrade is a man who always has a bandage, a granola bar, a lighter, and a pack of gum. Gregory Lestrade’s name floods Mycroft’s mind for a moment and brings with it several acknowledgements, not least among them an appreciation that the man’s presence in his brother’s life is evidence that the universe is unfolding as it should, or an appreciation that Mycroft’s relationship with his brother has somehow morphed into a world where a cop is their gatekeeper, or even an appreciation that if there _had_ be a gatekeeper, Mycroft supposes that he could have picked no better by his own hand than one Gregory Lestrade.

_Thank you very much, Inspector. I am much obliged to your kindness. -MH_

Before Gregory, Mycroft had not dared to breathe aloud the words _danger night_ to anyone else. He’d spent six miserable years trying, ineffectively, to rein Sherlock in alone.

_It’s not any trouble, Mycroft. I’m happy to do it. I’ll let you know when I know anything. -GL_

+

“You left,” Sherlock had snarled, the first night that Mycroft wondered whether he was going to have to watch his brother die. His mother’s voice floated into his head ( _it was never your job…_ ) and he had realized, all in one breath, that a person’s job is defined much more by their abilities than by the technical bounds of their responsibility.

“I am here now,” Mycroft had said tightly, and Sherlock had rolled his eyes before closing them: “You never get it right, Mycroft.”

When the officer on duty arrived, Sherlock had paid him an attention that Mycroft hadn’t seen from Sherlock in years.

He’d promptly kidnapped the officer, of course; there was nothing else for it. Where he’d been expecting to see all the same traps and pitfalls normally associated with his brother’s consorts, he’d seen a flash of white teeth and a firm, immediate refusal before Mycroft had even gotten a chance to name an amount.

And somehow, in the vast wildness of the universe, the sergeant (Lestrade, Mycroft had gleaned, and had promptly spent the rest of the night buried in his file) had kept texting him. And kept texting him. And kept texting him. For six years, now. And then had said, one night: _come over to mine?_ And had kissed him. And kept kissing him. And kept kissing him. For six months, now. And that, Mycroft thinks, is certainly something upon which to hang one’s hat. Or the sun, the moon, and all the stars. For a start. 

Mycroft isn’t completely sure what about this evening has turned him into such a sentimental sot, but he’s glad of at least being in private, with no further obligations for the evening. He rewinds the surveillance tape, once more watching Sherlock glance furtively around before reaching upward.

_You never really fit into my life_ , Mycroft thinks to himself, watching his brother’s deft movements and sighing, calculating the distance from the newly-disabled camera to each known crack house. _There was never anything about me or my life that you’d wanted._

That, he consoles himself, is not sentimentality. _That_ is an honest and accurate view of the situation. Truth feels good to lean on, and in this case life has been kind by giving him a perfect experiment: the neat, unquestionable dividing line between when Sherlock brought him sweaters and when Sherlock disabled cameras is also the line between when Mycroft’s life had been shaped by his family and when he had been allowed to grow into himself.

Mycroft indulges himself in a brief moment of pride: it is difficult but surely worthwhile to accept the results of good science, however unpalatable. He presses ‘eject’ on the tape.

_I will miss you_ , Sherlock had admitted, weeks before Mycroft moved away: a terribly brave thing for a Holmes to say, Mycroft grants, even as a young child. Mycroft, in turn, had had the temerity to reassure him that things would not change; that he would simply introduce his baby brother to his new home, new friends, new life.

He had, eventually, learned humility.

The first visit was also the last visit: Sherlock, nine years old, sitting on the twin bed in Mycroft’s Cambridge dormitory and unimpressed by it all; Mycroft, eighteen years old, realizing that perhaps a life crafted by his own hands is not one that Sherlock would appreciate after all.

That Christmas, they’d sat together in Mycroft’s bedroom (“your _real_ bedroom,” Sherlock had scowled, by way of an invitation) in the exact same stony silence, as Mycroft realized with unease that nothing had gotten better since Sherlock’s visit to his dormitory; it was as if seeing each other, being together, navigating the world outside the Holmes estate, had broken some sort of spell. Mycroft, having not realized that his brother’s love was such a fickle enchantment, allowed himself no small amount of heartbreak that Christmas, and had consoled himself that at least his bedrooms ( _both of them_ , he’d noted bitterly) were temporary. He could stare down the years to anticipate many more years spent re-realizing, each holiday, the depth of the asymmetry surrounding his and Sherlock’s hearts, but at least he would not endure it in the very rooms that had introduced the idea.

In the end, he’d gotten even this, as so many other details, wrong; in the end, his family had not moved. In the end, his father had recovered: an easy surgery, a benign tumor that cast a long shadow over their family without ever truly touching them. In the end, he and Sherlock had smoked underneath that magnolia tree for decades and would likely keep doing so for decades more; Mycroft’s parents, being the only threads in the world able to draw his little brother to him, are healthy. In the end, that same green paint had continued to surround them each year on Christmas; in the end, the dining room table proved to have room for many more scorches and gouges and dings over many more meals.

In the end, the house had not been enough. In the end, neither the table nor the tree nor even the health of their father had had anything to do with what kept Sherlock from drifting away from him. In the end, Mycroft would spend many more days in the house where he grew up, feeling a million miles away from the parents who’d given up everything for him, and from the brother who’d brought him a sweater and come into the darkness to tell him that he would miss him.

In the end, his brother had learned what Mycroft looked like out in the world and had decided: _no, thank you_.

_In the end_ , Mycroft thinks, feeling hopeless even as he breathes into the idea, _I perhaps ought to guard a bit more cautiously against getting worked up over how things end._

+

Greg Lestrade has taken Mycroft Holmes out for a drink - a small miracle by itself, such a milestone standing proudly above a relationship that until now has barely been spoken aloud - and is currently stirring the ice in a gin & tonic he’s been nursing for forty-five minutes, and Mycroft is thinking to himself, for perhaps the first honest time, that he doesn’t care how this ends. 

Their conversation has been, for most of the evening, light and easy, which is a testament to Greg’s disposition and to Mycroft’s heart’s damnable ability, even now, to be wrenched open along the slightest faults.

He remembers an issue of _New Scientist_ from when he was twelve: _Running water (that is, water that flows on the Earth's surface in streams and rivers) is the most powerful natural agent operating on the surface, and it changes the face of the Earth._ He’d regaled his parents at supper that evening, making sure that three-year-old Sherlock was listening, too.

_Water is one of Earth’s most plentiful substances_ , he’d explained, his parents beaming at his preternatural understanding of the natural world. _It’s unassuming, but it’s persistent, and will find its way anywhere, given enough time. It erodes; it freezes and expands to crack. It will weather everything away, eventually, and there’s almost nothing we can do on a grand scale to guard against it, because we need it to live._ He’d been awed, and a little terrified, even then, explaining to his parents the processes that changed the very face of the planet.

“You were outstanding today,” Greg tells him, now.

“Thank you.” Mycroft blushes. There’s nothing for it. 

“I’m glad you came along.” Greg’s voice seems to get quieter at this last, as he tips his glass toward Mycroft’s.

_Groundwater, given enough time, will enter any features containing the smallest cracks or joints. Repeated freezing and thawing can, over centuries, carve spectacular features into slabs of hard stone._

Mycroft finds himself wondering whether Greg would find himself enchanted by a thirty-nine year old man who recites decades-old _New Scientist_ articles on frost-wedging to himself in hopes of recognizing his own familiar patterns in the larger global geology, so as to remain calm when complimented by charming men who have been married, for many years (if perhaps excluding more recent years; _details_ ), to beautiful women.

His preternatural understanding of the natural world at twelve, he acknowledges, was perhaps not followed by a similarly nuanced understanding of human relationships.

“I was glad to accompany,” he murmurs. “And your performance was equally competent.”

Greg smirks a little into his drink; Mycroft finds himself thankful for how well the other man seems to have learned to read his reserved language. “Don’t mention it.”

“Mycroft.”

“Yes?”

“Are you…” Greg runs his fingers through his hair. “Are you okay?”

“Of course I am.” Mycroft’s answer is more rooted in instinct than in any true reflection.

“Okay.” Greg frowns. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Greg repeats, relaxing a bit into the echo. Mycroft can observe the precise moment that Greg decides to lean into trusting Mycroft not to lie. “Good. I’m glad.”

“Thank you for asking, though.”

“You’re welcome.”

“And thank you,” he says, “for your kindness to my brother,” and Greg looks at him with a smile that makes him want to die.

It has been six months. Six months of kissing in corners, six months of Googling ‘texting parameters semi-romantic relationship’, six months of raised eyebrows from Sherlock. Six months, and each time Greg looks at him, Mycroft is decimated.

_It will destroy everything. And we need it to live._

He wonders, for a moment, if he isn’t perhaps being a bit melodramatic. Those _were_ the words, though, spoken by a source as undramatic as _New Scientist_ magazine: _It will destroy everything. And we need it to live._ And if it’s true of something as unassuming as water, why not Gregory Lestrade?

“Kinda wanna go somewhere and make out with you a bit,” Greg murmurs, the edges of his voice sanded off by a day of shouting and an evening of whisky. “Kinda wanna mess up your hair a bit. Kinda wanna get you a little messy, get your jacket off, get you to stay for a bit.”

Mycroft gestures a bit frantically for their check with Greg’s hand on his thigh as he makes peace with the idea that if anything, he has not had the vocabulary to describe Greg properly up to now: Greg absolutely will destroy him.

Which is fine, he reasons, as he scrawls his name inelegantly across the bottom of the receipt, Greg’s fingertips playing across the back of his neck and Greg’s breath hot across the shell of his ear. He catalogs, for a moment, each potential ending, and then he closes his eyes and allows himself to catalog the way that the very tip of Greg’s tongue feels as it brushes softly over the skin immediately behind his earlobe.

_All things end_ , he thinks, snapping the billfold closed and gesturing for Greg to follow him as he rises, knowing that his eyes can’t possibly look anything but dark and hungry as the other man jumps up behind him. _And I am ready, having guarded so well against getting worked up over how._


	2. all things, great & small (greg)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They’re home from the bar, finally, after what must have been the longest cab ride in the history of Greg’s entire life, and Mycroft Holmes, God bless him, is lying in Greg’s bed and is saying absolutely nothing about his peeling wallpaper or his lumpy mattress and is saying everything in the world, somehow, about Greg’s ability to "mess up his hair a little bit", as he’d so eloquently described, without ever using an actual word. Greg fumbles with the buttons on Mycroft’s waistcoat and thinks that maybe he has never wanted anyone so much in his life.

They’re home from the bar, finally, after what must have been the longest cab ride in the history of Greg’s entire life, and Mycroft Holmes, God bless him, is lying in Greg’s bed and is saying absolutely nothing about his peeling wallpaper or his lumpy mattress and is saying everything in the world, somehow, about Greg’s ability to _mess up his hair a little bit_ , as he’d so eloquently described, without ever using an actual word. Greg fumbles with the buttons on Mycroft’s waistcoat and thinks that maybe he has never wanted anyone so much in his life.

It has been six months, which really is no small miracle for a man who for years looked in the mirror every morning and wondered whether anyone else was able to see the smoking wreckage of his life, the way he came crashing down into himself at the end of each day. The goal was never next year, next month, tomorrow. The goal was always: survive, today, survive. Get through. And he did, almost in spite of himself: he survived over, and over, and over again. He survived everything. He survived the divorce hearings, he survived seeing his pretty wife posting on Facebook a new picture of her new boyfriend around the new table that she’d bought to put in their old house. (“Delete your goddamn Facebook,” his brother had said, and he’d rolled his eyes, though conceded that perhaps de-friending his ex-wife was in order, for at least a little while.) He survived the quiet claps on the back, he survived Sally’s bringing him coffee every day and then survived figuring out that it was because she thought no one else would.

And one day, Mycroft Holmes had looked at him a little differently, and he’d said: _Detective Inspector, you have had a very difficult year_. And he’d survived not crying when he replied: _yeah. I really have._ And he’d survived crying a very little bit, which Mycroft Holmes had very graciously overlooked, when the other man said: _and you have risen up to meet it, really quite admirably._ And then he’d survived six years of nearly daily texting, and then he’d survived one absolutely wild first kiss. And though, for a very long time, Greg had identified himself primarily as a survivor, he looks back now and realizes that he hasn’t thought of himself as surviving anything at all in ages.

No small miracle at all, he thinks - but then, when in the world would Mycroft Holmes have ever been classified as such?

The way Mycroft presses up against his body now feels so good, and there’s a spark of a moment where he wonders whether he shouldn’t feel a little dizzy, a little ashamed of how heavily he’s breathing, except that with Mycroft everything has always felt so wonderfully in sync. Mycroft is _reciprocal_ , and Mycroft gives _exactly_ as good as he gets, every damn time, and Mycroft is so wonderfully, vividly alive, here in his arms.

Mycroft kisses him so desperately, every single time, seemingly uninfluenced by hour, day, or place, with this plaintive, unabashed hunger that Greg doesn’t completely understand. He suspects that Mycroft’s never quite been able to speak his mind to him; he recognizes what it looks like to bite back on a truth. The words are there, he knows - Mycroft has an entire night sky in his head, of course he does, clusters and constellations of promises that he’s never quite felt safe enough to let ring up to the rafters - but how could Greg doubt someone who kisses like he wants to live inside him?

The realization is thunderous: all at once, Greg understands that there are pieces of this composed, imperious man that look exactly like the most painful, jagged parts of himself, the ones he keeps most hidden, the ones he tucks deep into the corners of his mind when Sherlock looks at him as if he’s never heard the word _secret_ in his life. There are, somehow, pieces of Mycroft that look like pieces of him:

_Oh, my love, but you’ve been lonely, too._

Greg sometimes feels like he needs to practically sit on his hands about the way he feels about Mycroft. He moves too fast, wants too much, falls too hard, he knows, he always has, and it’s not a great look on anyone but it’s _certainly_ not a great look on a recently-divorced man who hasn’t been with another man in decades. There’s no doubt in his mind that Mycroft wants him - for all of the man’s restraint, he might as well be renting out newspaper advertisements in his eyes when he looks over at Greg at the end of an evening together - but beyond that, all there _is_ is doubt. 

So, yes: he moves too fast in love, but he’ll let himself have that one - God knows he’s spent most of his life trying to slow down his traitorous heart, and by now he’s declared that more or less a lost cause and as a consolation prize learned to keep it buttoned down tightly, thank you very much. He’s happy, honestly, to let Mycroft set the pace of their physical relationship.

And Mycroft, never one to squander an opportunity for control, sets it happily, so Greg, a man of his word, waits. And he waits, and he waits, and he waits.

Six months is a long time to spend kissing. Which is fine. He’d follow Mycroft to the ends of the earth, to the middle of the sea, to the stars. It’s just… a long time. It leaves a lot of time for staring, for hoping, for memorizing. And it leaves a lot of time to add up all of that staring, all of that hoping, all of that memorizing, and then to set aside more time for thinking, for anticipating, for imagining. And if Mycroft’s never been one to squander an opportunity for control, then Greg has never been one to squander an opportunity to let his imagination drift around him.

When he imagines fucking Mycroft Holmes (and oh, but he _does_ imagine it, basically constantly, as if he’s fifteen again getting distracted in algebra by his hard-on, except these days it’s nice fountain pens held in long fingers and gin & tonics, and Greg thinks for one hysterical moment that it’s a real shame that the only person he could imagine asking whether it’s possible to develop a sexual Pavlovian response to fine spirits is Mycroft himself)... well, when Greg Lestrade imagines fucking Mycroft Holmes, he thinks about making him dirty. 

At the end of the day, it’s not much more than an exercise in utility, in adaptation. Greg has spent so long trying to make himself clean for Mycroft and it’s just no good. He was made for Mycroft, he knows that: every atom dancing inside of him was made to match an atom making up Mycroft’s eyelashes, or the dimples on the backs of his elbows, or the soft hair on his belly. There is no part of Greg Lestrade that couldn’t find a home in even the smallest part of Mycroft Holmes, but it’s still all wrong, and it’s wrong because of him. The only way, then, that it’s ever going to feel like they were made for each other is if Mycroft becomes less perfect. Greg, after many months of trying, is ready to concede that he cannot make himself more like Mycroft, and so, in absence of preference, he will have to try to make Mycroft more like him.

“Mycroft,” he whispers, now, wondering if Mycroft knows him well enough by now to know that the ragged harshness of his voice means _I love you_. _There is a universe in every atom_ , Mycroft had read to him just this afternoon, _and so there are millions of universes in each of us_ , and every single one of his universes stretches on and on and on into a bright white forever, each of its suns and stars and moons and planets bringing every living thing together - _all things great and small_ \- into the same place to sing the same song - _I love you, I love you, I love you_ \- and it isn’t his fault that the only language these great and small things know how to speak is Mycroft’s name. “Mycroft. Mycroft.”

“Greg,” this unbelievable man murmurs back in this reverent tone that makes Greg convinced that Mycroft has heard him, and for this tiny, shining moment in Greg’s shitty bedroom and his shitty flat, everything is perfect. Inside this second, they can be anything. Inside this second, images of Mycroft at fifty unfurl: first an image of them out to dinner, celebrating a successful trial verdict; then an image of them stumbling home from dinner - as always, he can’t keep his hands off Mycroft, good to see some things don’t change - they’re making out in a stairwell now - what stairwell? which? he can’t wait to learn - and then - and then images of the two of them climbing up said stairwell to the small, clean loft they share, covered in books and plants and more books and paintings and all of the living things that make up the sparks of his heart, and he _wants that_ , he knows it’s insane but he wants _this man_ who has made an entire life out of being unanchored and of looking straight forward, never up or down - and maybe it’s possible. Why not? _This man_ , after all, kisses _him_ here, now, thirty-eight in 2015, but fifty someday, and eighty after that, but it doesn’t matter because Greg can’t imagine a time where Mycroft won’t be just perfect… and so, in desperation, he kisses Mycroft just that little bit harder, because Jesus Christ, but he can see _everything_ , in any universe. Even tomorrow.

It has been such a very, very long time since Greg has been able to see tomorrow.

So. Maybe he was wrong, all those years ago. Maybe everything about his stupid life can be fixed; it’s been six months, and Mycroft isn’t showing any signs of running yet, and he’d be damned if he could tell you which part of that sentence is the most unbelievable. So. Maybe some happy endings are lived, rather than written or read. Maybe he isn’t even living an ending in the first place; maybe he is living a beginning. The word _tomorrow_ flares inside of him like a living thing, twisting and turning with joy, and he kisses Mycroft even harder at how good it feels, finally, to look forward. _Please know_ , he prays, to whoever is listening. He drops kisses onto the open part of Mycroft’s skin, where the buttons of his shirt part, and all of a sudden Greg wants nothing in the world more than to just be inside him. _Please know._ He loves him so much. He has for years. The only difference now is that it’s allowed. _Please know. Please, please, please know._

“Please, no,” Mycroft murmurs, louder and a little less dreamily, rolling out from underneath him. Mycroft’s words are running into Greg’s own thoughts, and he’s barely heard them before Mycroft is sitting up on the bed, raking a hand through his hair. The first words Mycroft says after Greg gets his bearings are: “Greg, did you really think it was going to be like this?”

_Not in a million years,_ he thinks immediately.

“It… can’t,” Mycroft continues, low voice drenched with something reticent that, to Greg’s overwhelmed ears, sounds almost like it might be pain. “Not like this. Not when… not while we’ve both been drinking this much. We’ve been _drinking_ , Greg,” and all of a sudden the understanding slams home.

“Oh,” Greg replies, with perhaps more dawning comprehension than he would have chosen, given the opportunity to file it down a bit. “Oh.”

“Yes. I don’t want… I don’t want the first… not… not you, like this.”

There are a few moments, during their time together, that Greg has been unable to resist wondering whether he’s witnessing a first for Mycroft Holmes. For example: watching Mycroft take a bite objectively too big for his mouth out of the very bottom of an ice cream cone, having resigned himself to the idea that August is melting the dessert faster than he’d be able to eat it with any dignity. For example: the time that Mycroft had let out what Greg suspected to be an accidental gasp and an open-mouthed smile at the sight of an absolutely radiant sunset, coming up the stairs to a rooftop after being cooped up in an interrogation cell together with a suspect for eleven hours. For example, more importantly than - at the moment - anything else in the world: that sentence, such as it were, more disjointed and wrong-footed than anything Greg can ever remember having come out of Mycroft’s mouth, strung entirely together out of orphaned clauses and laden pauses.

“Okay,” Greg nods, letting himself wrap around the idea that Mycroft is objecting to the manner that this is unfolding, not to the idea that Greg could possibly want Mycroft to have sex with him. “Yeah, absolutely, Mycroft. That’s okay. Not tonight, then.”

“Not tonight,” Mycroft echoes. “But someday. Soon. Just… not tonight.” Greg recognizes the way that he makes his voice sweet for Greg’s own benefit and in that moment, so hard that it hurts and dizzy with the way it feels to imagine the apartment they’ll share, he doesn’t care: he moves to kiss Mycroft again, this man who would spin sugar into his own voice for the benefit of a copper who’s too broken not to need it.

“Of course.” He moves to drop an open-mouthed kiss on Mycroft’s collarbone, allowing himself a shock of joy that he should be so allowed. “Of course, sweetheart. Of course.”

_I loved being married_ , he wants to tell Mycroft someday, not because he gives a shit about Linda but because he needs Mycroft to know that Greg, at his best, comes home to somebody at the end of the night, folds his arms around them and whispers: _hello, my sweetheart, how was your day?_

_I loved being married_ , he wants to tell Mycroft someday, because last week when he was buying new bedsheets he went for “dove grey” and for 400 thread-count and when Mycroft on Sunday evening said, _these are nice_ , his heart sang up to the heavens. _Thanks_ , he’d murmured, blushing.

“Not tonight,” Mycroft echoes again, “but soon. I am… I am almost ready.” Mycroft isn’t an echoer. Greg wonders if he slips into redundancy when he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

“Soon is good,” Greg whispers, moving himself into Mycroft’s arms and planting kisses along the line of his jaw. “Doesn’t need to be now. Doesn’t need to be ever. It’s all okay. This, though, for now?”

“God, yes.” The groan rips out of Mycroft’s throat as if he isn’t aware of it in the slightest. “You could keep doing that forever, actually, Greg.”

_I loved being married_ , he wants to tell Mycroft someday, because he’s been working so hard not to be the first one to say the word “forever”, and it doesn’t mean anything other than everything.

“Are you sleepy?” Mycroft asks, later that evening, and Greg is, in fact, so drowsy he can barely keep his eyes open, and the way that Mycroft’s arms are encircling him isn’t helping him in the endeavor.

“Yes,” he admits, figuring it’s safe. They’re at his house, he figures, and so the worst that happens is that Mycroft just… leaves. He doesn’t need to kick Greg out, the way he would if they were over in Kensington. He doesn’t need to remind Greg that he has an early morning the next day (which he does, every day, by virtue of simply being alive). He could very simply stretch, tell Greg that he has had “a very wonderful evening”, and let himself out.

Mycroft, wildly, does none of those things. He resettles the arm that he’s crossed over Greg’s chest, and his breath lands hot over the shell of Greg’s ear, and he drops a kiss so small that Greg almost can’t feel it under the skin of Greg’s earlobe, and he says: “Sleep, then. Are you warm enough?”

“Yes,” Greg replies, and the same hungry living thing at the core of him that had flared earlier at the thought of _tomorrow_ does a small delighted flip at the small sound Mycroft makes as he settles in behind Greg, spooning up and brushing the hair off his forehead. “I am.”

Just before Greg falls asleep, he feels Mycroft’s breath over his ear, again, and experiences a cotton fog of confusion before he realizes that Mycroft is whispering to him, actual words, and he tries as hard as he can to make out the words before he drifts away.

“-sorry, truly, for waiting until you are asleep,” Mycroft is saying, moving his fingertips across Greg’s back. “I only wanted to tell you that I am thankful for you, Gregory, in ways that I don’t know how to articulate to you when you’re awake. You are good, and brave, and patient, and kind, and I suppose I am simply… grateful, in ways that even still feel remarkable, to hold you while you fall asleep. I don’t think-”

There’s more, Greg’s sure, but between the warmth of Mycroft’s arms and the rhythmic sounds of his murmurings, he finds himself slipping away from _today_ , and as the moon shines down on them and scatters its light through threadbare curtains, and as Mycroft kisses his eyelashes as if he’ll die if he doesn’t count them all, his heart runs through the night like a creature unto itself and dreams, dreams, dreams, insistent as anything else Greg has ever done, about _tomorrow_.


	3. his blood sings my name (mycroft)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Between the combined antics of South America and his brother, and given that he is managing it all on two hours of sleep (a notable deficit, even for him), this has been the longest day of Mycroft’s month - which is really saying something, after all, given how much of a wreck April always is.

Between the combined antics of South America and his brother, and given that he is managing it all on two hours of sleep (a notable deficit, even for him), this has been the longest day of Mycroft’s month - which is _really_ saying something, after all, given how much of a wreck April always is. And so 6pm on the second Wednesday in April finds him - tired, off-kilter, snappish - and he isn’t sure, not really, how resilient this… _thing_ that he and Greg have managed to build is, at the end of the day, but what better way is there to find out than watching Greg run his fingers through his hair and sighing the way that a man sighs when he’s looking to breathe the fight straight out of his lungs?

“You know, you don’t always have to be the one to run in after Sherlock and rush to clean up his mess.”

“Yes I do,” Mycroft returns, so immediately that he almost sounds distracted, even to his own ears. “Of course I do.”

“Why on earth do you think that?”

“Because I _have to_. Because no one else will.”

“So, what, you can’t point to someone that you know with certainty will bail him out, so it has to be you?”

“Of _course it has to be me_. If not me, who?”

“Your own bloody brother his own bloody self, for bloody one. He’s… thirty-one?”

“Yes.”

“That’s _old enough_ ,” Greg blusters. “It’s old enough to where I think you’re allowed to at least _consider_ the possibility that maybe you don’t have to live for both of you anymore.”

“It is my job,” Mycroft says, through gritted teeth.

“Taking care of your brother?” Greg is incredulous and Mycroft finds that he wants to slap the disbelief off his gaping face, and honestly - of course it’s ending like this. Of course this would never be something Mycroft could hold onto. Of course the only person he’d be left holding onto at the end of all this would be Sherlock, who never wanted him in the first place.

Mycroft remembers the night, six and a half years ago, now, that they’d first exchanged phone numbers. _This way, we can keep an eye on your brother together_ , Greg had said, white teeth gleaming in a dark night, and Mycroft had shuddered with all of the things that grin had ignited in him.

He remembers the first text message Greg had sent him, unprompted, a few months later: _Was wondering whether you might turn up at today’s scene. I think your brother might have been expecting you, though God knows I’ve been trying to speak Sherlock’s language for years and I often miss._

He remembers learning what it felt to feel everything that had once ignited shatter. He remembers learning how absurd it feels to beg without speaking. _Please don’t let it be like this. Please don’t let this - us - be about my brother. Please - please, please let me have this one beautiful thing - you - be about me and not him._

“Hello?” Greg is asking, now, looking more annoyed than Mycroft has ever seen him. “Are you honestly taking the position that taking care of your _very_ adult brother is somehow _your_ job?”

“Yes. It has been my job since he was quite small. I take it very seriously and I still don’t do nearly as well as I’d like. Does that seem to you like an appropriate place to exert less effort?”

“So,” Greg says, looking wildly unimpressed. “At some point I do think we have to name that your parents gave you a fucking complex.”

“My parents did their best,” Mycroft says stiffly, wanting to snarl. “You cannot imagine what it must have been like.”

“I can,” Greg replies dryly. “And, love… I know they did their best. Of course they did. But it doesn’t help anything to pretend that their best was perfect, does it?” 

Mycroft thinks of his mother, of his father, of the dining room table, of the green paint in the kitchen, of the magnolia tree in the yard. He thinks of the way that Greg - sweet, blessedly patient Greg - exhales when he’s trying to breathe instead of fight, and he takes the sharpest inhale in through his nose he can manage and he tries to imagine bringing the stillness of the room into his body along with it. He tries to imagine the calm rolling through his chest and rooting in, settling into his lungs and sitting behind his ribs. He tries to imagine a world where Greg’s question doesn’t make him want to cry. Or scream. Or fight.

“Hey, hey, I’m sorry,” Greg murmurs immediately, his voice a strange cocktail of softness and alarm but sounding altogether more like a wave of cold water. Mycroft admires, not for the first time, how adept Greg is at pushing the fight out of his words, so quickly that no traces remain. Mycroft might question a lesser man’s sincerity, but Greg is unassailable. “Shit, love, I’m sorry. That was too much. Too far. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.” _Repeated freezing and thawing can, over centuries, carve spectacular features into slabs of hard stone._

_How horrible_ , he thinks, now, too late, _to be shaped_.

“No it’s bloody well not,” Greg insists. “Can I touch you?”

“Arms,” Mycroft answers, clipped, because the only thing worse than watching Greg walk out of his life forever would be remembering the feeling of Greg holding him and trying to parse out, later, what had been pity, this entire time.

“Sweetheart, I’m sorry,” Greg repeats, brushing his fingertips up and down Mycroft’s forearm. “We’ve never… we’ve never talked about your family. I shouldn’t have… not without…”

“It’s all right, Greg.” Mycroft raises his voice a bit at that last and notes, with reluctant fondness, that Greg does not shrink back.

“Can we try again?” he asks instead, softly, and Mycroft’s heart unwrenches a little.

“Again,” he repeats, shaking the rust out of his mind like Greg shakes rain out of his hair. “Again…?”

“Yes, your great, blundering idiot would love to try this whole thing again, if you’ll have it.” Greg is _laughing_ at him - nervously, as if he might accidentally laugh his heart right out of his chest - but _still_ \- Greg is _laughing_.

_In what world. In exactly what world. In exactly what. blessed. world._

“You’re not an idiot,” Mycroft corrects, for lack of anything more substantial, for lack of adequate response to the idea that Greg could be _his_ anything, for lack of willingness to let the record stand, unqualified. He takes refuge in the idea that his amendment is, at least, altogether true.

“I’ll accept that, in the spirit of a man who isn’t quite sure how he’s earned what he has,” Greg allows, still laughing a little as if he hasn’t just read the whole of Mycroft’s heart straight back to him. His fingertips are still reveling over Mycroft’s arm, sneaking up to his shoulder, and Mycroft - Mycroft and his _damnable heart_ \- leans into the touch in spite of himself.

“I want to get you right,” Greg continues, taking his hand down from Mycroft’s shoulder to gesture at the space between them before finally settling his fingers back onto the bony part of Mycroft’s wrist and circling slowly. Mycroft wants to scream with how lovely it feels to finally have Greg touching his skin. “I want to get _this_ right, get _us_ right. It’s important to me.”

“All right,” Mycroft says, a bit dumbly, and Greg does the whole-body soften that he does when Mycroft isn’t getting something because it’s written in love.

“I’m sorry I spoke ill of your parents,” Greg says, in a sort of _I’ll-go-first-then_ tone. “And I wish… Mycroft, I respect you so much, and I love how hard you work and how hard you fight, and I get that I’m sort of wishing away the things that I love about you here, but I - I _do_ wish you didn’t have to carry quite so much around with you all the time. That’s all.”

“I have always carried it,” Mycroft replies. “Always.”

“And hasn’t it… hasn’t it gotten in the way, love? Of you and everyone else?”

“There has never been anyone else,” Mycroft admits, this strange familiar wave of loneliness and shame washing over him. He cannot look at Greg. His face is burning. “Never.”

“How could there be?” Greg’s voice is impossibly gentle. Mycroft wants to die. 

“How could there be,” Mycroft repeats. “You are… you are _perfect_ , Greg. And you see what it has been like to try to fit you into my life. Even now, I worry that...”

Mycroft, at thirty-nine years old, has had twenty years to think about the way his mother’s eyes looked, sitting across from him at their dining room table as she’d told him: _along the way, we make choices. We can’t keep it all. It’s the saddest part about life, Mycroft._ And she really had looked sad. She’d looked downright shattered, and he hadn’t attended to it - hadn’t even truly acknowledged it, even to himself - because he hadn’t known how. _We have to be very careful about what we keep, and about what we set down in order to make room for it._

He thinks about her framed degrees, hanging in a study she’d converted into a sewing room. He thinks about the way his father always talked about her, proud as he described her in the past-tense, glowing as he thought of all the things she was before she was a woman with a family.

_Be honest, don’t get caught up in sentiment_ , he instructs himself. _It wasn’t all in the past-tense, was it?_ He closes his eyes and he thinks about the last time he saw his parents: four months ago, over Christmas, and John Watson had been home, for the first time, and his father, who had always taken a particularly beautiful kind of joy in getting to introduce his mother, had gestured over to her, pride shaking into both of his hands with each tiny movement, and had said to John: _she is brilliant_ , the same as he’s said for Mycroft’s entire life.

_She is. She is brilliant. She always has been, and she is, now. Still._

He thinks about the only time he’d ever asked her about all the things she could have been. He thinks about how her voice had sounded: _many things, probably, and in all of it, I got to be your mum._ And for all the uncertainty he’s inherited from her, Mycroft has never once questioned whether his mother meant that - never once questioned whether she loved him the way that she claimed.

Mycroft’s eyes snap back open. “I am afraid,” he confesses, and the magnitude of the understanding in Greg’s eyes reassures and terrifies him in equal parts as he understands, maybe for the first time: _if I am to build a family, a sewing room, a dining room table, this man will be the one proud to introduce me._ “I am afraid that I will not be _able_ , ultimately, to fit you into my life properly.”

“One step at a time, maybe,” Greg suggests, and Mycroft shakes his head with a violence that surprises even himself.

“ _No_. No. I do not wish… I do not do things by halves.”

“You certainly don’t.”

“I will not apologize,” Mycroft says sharply, looking up.

“Of course not.” Mycroft can hear Greg smiling again. “You shouldn’t. It’s such a lovely thing about you, your focus.”

_Groundwater, given enough time, will enter any features containing the smallest cracks or joints. Repeated freezing and thawing can, over centuries..._

“‘Focus’ slightly understates the matter. I… Greg, please listen. Please. Try to understand. I cannot say this twice.”

“Okay.”

“I enjoy your company. Immensely. Profoundly. Sincerely.”

“I like you too, sweetheart,” Greg grins. Mycroft is ready to throttle him until he feels the gentle squeeze of Greg’s hand.

“I am afraid that I will not be able to make room for the fullness of your company in an already probably-overfull life. My brother and my work by themselves would each present challenges. I already struggle very often to serve both roles effectively. And I…”

_And I care about getting this right more than I have ever cared about anything in the world._

In one bright, startling moment, the truth descends upon Mycroft before he can feel all the waves of guilt and shame wash over him from admitting that Gregory Lestrade has somehow snuck into his heart and buried himself in the middle of everything, in the middle of all the duty and the honor and the obligation, and Mycroft instead is washed over by a very simple realization: Gregory Lestrade has not _snuck in_ at all. Gregory Lestrade has been _let in_ , has very simply knocked on the door of his heart and walked right in after being invited inside while Mycroft wasn’t looking because Greg is made, for the first time in the history of Mycroft wanting other people, of possibilities.

_I want to be loved back._

“If we… if we embarked on this,” Mycroft continues, stilted. “That is, if we… if we continued. If you were… if you were always here, at the end of… days like, well, today. If you were always here, it would be… it would be very important to me to be… well, to be…”

He chances a look up at Greg, hoping to decide to either keep going or to stop. The expression on Greg’s face is enough to crease his own heart. “My God. You’re listening to me as if your life depends on it,” he marvels. _Even here. Even this._

“I’m not,” Greg disagrees immediately. “The people in your life - the ones who _do_ listen to you, anyway - maybe _those people_ listen as if their lives depend on it. My life has never depended on you. You’ve always been a choice.”

_Greg._ The name shoots through Mycroft’s mind like an explosion. _I will never survive you. Not like this._

“You are so kind,” Mycroft murmurs. “I cannot - even now - believe how kind you are to me.”

I stayed at work until 2am last night, he thinks to himself. I avoided a coup in South America and stabilized three economically separate Norwegian industries. I left Greg in bed alone because the world needed me. Over six hours, I produced a 4,500-word report to have on the PM’s desk by morning - _this_ morning, he realizes - and it was a long night, but no longer than I am used to. I am used to burning myself up on behalf of my country. I am accustomed to great feats.

And this man sits in front of me, hungry for my words because he is hungry for _me_ \- not power, not money, not influence - and when I try to explain to him what it means that I can reach across the bed for him in the middle of the night and find that he sighs softly into the crook of my shoulder, half-asleep, because his blood sings my name… when I try to explain what this does to me, the only true thing I know how to give is the truth: _I cannot believe how kind you are to me._

_All my words are gone for you, Greg Lestrade._

“If it helps, I’ve never really been able to believe anything about you and me,” Greg replies, seeming a little helpless and laughing a bit as he pulls Mycroft to him. 

And it _does_ help: that’s what he needs. He keeps going. He suspects that he always will. He wonders what the rock feels like, cold and dark and impossibly unyielding for centuries before it is split neatly and carved up along its faults by something as simple and small as water. He imagines that it feels like this, Greg’s shoulders warm and solid against his chest.

He takes a breath, before the bald truth: “If we embarked on this, I would want to be good to you.” Mycroft squeezes Greg’s hands. “And that’s the bald truth. That’s all there is. It would nearly kill me to cut this off now, Greg, but I confess that I want to, because I can’t imagine a world where I have the space to be good to you. My brother, and my work… I would not have _time_ to be good to you. And I…”

“You what, love?” Greg asks gently. Mycroft wants to cry at the endearment.

“Even if… even if I _could_ do it all, even if I _had_ time, you would not want… I am sometimes…”

“Sometimes _what_ , love?” 

“I take too much,” he says, all in one breath. “If _you_ made room for everything, I would take it all. But I have never known how to give space,” he breathes to Greg, whose face is watching so carefully that he almost buckles under it. “I have only ever… cared,” he explains, choking down the word _love_ carefully and choosing to score it as a victory, “by being too much.”

Greg nods a bit, not with the air of someone who knows that he’s doing it, and Mycroft is encouraged - even if Greg doesn’t like hearing this, he’s at least allowing Mycroft to breathe it out.

“I have always known that I’m doing it,” he continues, softly. “I have always been able to feel myself pushing people away. Like trying to take something on a shelf just out of reach - touching it and in doing so moving it permanently out of my grasp.”

“Your brother,” Greg murmurs.

“My brother. My brother who I’d go weeks - sometimes months, sometimes years - without seeing, were it not for CCTV.”

“Yes. Well. Your brother’s a fuckin’ tosser, love.”

Mycroft laughs out loud with surprise and is delighted to find that where he expected numbness, he instead feels lightness. “Fair point, inspector.”

“If your brother had two brain cells to rub together between all that genius he’d understand that all you’ve ever tried to do is protect him.”

“My brother _is_ a tosser,” Mycroft concedes, laughing a bit with the delirious happiness of being able to share this with Greg, before his eyes become serious. “But… Greg, I…” He frowns. “I have not breathed this to many people, you understand.”

“Yes.”

“And if you repeated it, I would deny it.”

“Yes.”

“And people would believe me. They would not believe you.”

“ _Mycroft_!”

Mycroft looks at Greg, then, with a measure of fondness that he hopes Greg translates accurately: _I did not know what exasperation looked like when it was underlain by joy, not frustration_. He suspects that he is at the very beginning of a long lifetime of not knowing quite how to say _thank you_. “I care very much about my brother. I hold his opinion in high regard. And when we were young, he… he made it quite clear that he did not like me, not as I was.”

“He doesn’t like most people.”

“Most people haven’t held him,” Mycroft returns, easily and immediately. “Most people haven’t fought for him, paid for him, threatened for him, lied for him. Most people don’t know what he looks like when he is trying not to cry. Most people don’t know what he looks like when he is trying not to _die_. I am perfectly unbothered that he doesn’t like most people. I am bothered that he doesn’t like _me_.” Mycroft looks up. “I’ve never known why. I’ve tried everything. I’ve never tried to be good to anyone the way I’ve tried with my brother. It’s never worked.”

“Mycroft,” Greg sighs. “Sweetheart. Jesus. Come here.”

Greg’s arms are warm, and soft, and Mycroft thinks that this is the moment that he finally understands this lifelong refrain, living in his blood as surely as iron: _along the way, we make choices. We can’t keep it all. It’s the saddest part about life, Mycroft. We have to be very careful about what we keep, and about what we set down in order to make room for it._

“So you’ve spent a lot of time, then, trying to be less of yourself, yes?”

“Yes. Always. Since… well, since Sherlock.”

“I think that’s a shame,” Greg says quietly. “I rather like who you are. I wish I had more of you.”

“You wouldn’t,” Mycroft demurs, shaking his head. _There is so much of me._

“Can I blow your mind?” Greg asks, and Mycroft’s eyebrow arches a mile into the air.

“Detective Inspector.” Mycroft raises his head and cranes his head to look at Greg. “I think we’re both vividly aware of every possible avenue the answer to that question might entail.”

Greg rolls his eyes, but the fondness in his features betrays him. “ _Honestly_ , Mycroft. Jesus. But truly. Can I tell you what I’m thinking when I hear you say that?”

“Of course.”

Greg licks his lips and looks across the table. “I want it all.”

The devastation must show on Mycroft’s face. “You… what?”

“Everything. Whatever you’re hiding. Whatever you’re trying to keep away from me. Whatever you’re trying to make sure I can’t see because if I do I’ll figure out that you’re too much and leave you. Everything. All of it. I want it all. From you.”

_If I don’t say this to you right now, I will die,_ Mycroft thinks, frantically studying Greg’s dark eyes as if he has any idea what he’s looking for. 

“I love you,” Greg tells him, before he can find the words. The world shatters.

“I love you too,” Mycroft gasps. What else is there?

“I know you do.” Greg is smiling at him so broadly that it seems like it must be hurting him. “I know you do, because you beat me here - I know it - but you waited outside until I got here and then we opened the door together.” Greg smiles. “You waited for me. Not even sure you knew you were doing it.”

“Doing what?”

“Holding back.”

Mycroft’s eyebrow shoots back up. “Greg. It’s gallant that you think that could _possibly_ be true, but I am… well. I am _very_ aware.”

“Yeah?” Greg’s eyes darken.

“Yes. Every single day that I bit down on everything I wanted to tell you, I was vividly aware of doing so.”

“Like what?” Greg asks, with the tone of someone unable to stop himself. 

“You are much happier not knowing,” Mycroft assures him, wondering if even that is too much.

“You should let me be the judge of that.”

“I am a perfectly adequate judge in this case, thank you.”

“I don’t think so, Mycroft Holmes.”

Mycroft looks at Greg, weighing the options, and then smiles. “All right, then.”

“All right what?” 

“ _All right_ , here’s everything,” Mycroft says, and crosses his office, punching some numbers into a firesafe and then pulling out a small black notebook.

“Tuesday, April 9,” he reads, opening the notebook midway.

“ _Yesterday_ ,” Greg murmurs.

“ _Yesterday_ ,” Mycroft confirms, gratified by the delicious shiver that runs down Greg’s spine. “I look at Gregory’s eyes some days and I find myself wanting to lock him into a cage so that I can study his irises. They look black, often, but last night, at the Diogenes, he sat by the fire and it was the first time I understood how many flecks of gold they contain. I think if he would let me, I would be quite content to pin him down for hours and map out his body without ever asking to kiss him. I would ask him to keep his eyes open the entire time.”

“Holy shit,” Greg breathes, and Mycroft flips back a page.

“Saturday, April 6,” he reads, locking eyes with Greg, who takes a breath and does some math.

“The pub,” Greg says, and something proud and possessive flips in Mycroft’s stomach.

“The pub,” he echoes, before reading on: “I met Gregory’s first girlfriend tonight, entirely by chance. They were together for three months when they were sixteen. She was charming and I was surprised to find that I felt no jealousy. In fact, in testament both to my growing love for and trust in Gregory, and my all-encompassing need to know everything about him, I found myself mourning the fact that I’ll likely never see what Gregory looks like when he makes a woman come. Though,” he raises his eyebrows and finishes the sentence, before snapping the book closed: “it is almost certainly for the best.”

“Holy _fucking_ shit,” Greg murmurs, crossing the room to pull Mycroft into the most passionate kiss he can. “You call me Gregory in your little black book?”

“I do,” Mycroft murmurs back, around kisses that make him think Greg might be trying to crawl inside of him. “I have always called you Gregory when I imagine you.”

“Oh, my God,” Greg shivers, pressing himself into Mycroft’s thigh. “How in the _fuck_ could you possibly think I wouldn’t want all of you?”

“I couldn’t possibly have let myself hope, before I knew,” Mycroft confesses, burying his head in the soft juncture between Greg’s neck and shoulder. “To have let myself believe and then to have been wrong would have been a folly beyond even my own hubris.”

“Not hubris if you’re right,” Greg returns lightly, kissing down Mycroft’s jaw. “You couldn’t imagine the ways I want you.”

“I am… very imaginative, Gregory.” Mycroft sighs, opening his mouth to continue the banter before Greg interrupts him.

“Say that again,” he insists, moving open-mouthed kisses across Mycroft’s collarbone as his fingertips work on opening Mycroft’s shirt. “God, Mycroft, say that again.”

For a moment, Mycroft’s brain skitters-- _say what again?_ \--before a delicious sort of understanding soaks through his consciousness. 

“I’ll say whatever you like, _Gregory_.” He lets the delight cut through his voice. “Anything you like.”

“I wanna read the whole book someday,” Greg murmurs. Mycroft snorts even as he delights in the feeling of Greg’s lips moving against his neck.

“You may absolutely not.”

“ _Someday_ ,” Greg pushes. “Not tomorrow. Just someday.” He kisses Mycroft on the temple. “Life is long.”

Mycroft is startled to find, all in one breath, that he finds himself not only assenting, but grateful: life _is_ long, and there is still so much before them. _It’s unassuming, but it’s persistent, and will find its way anywhere, given enough time._

He sighs. “Thank goodness,” he agrees, wondering even as the words leave his lips whether he’s ever said something quite so cloying in his life.

“We have time,” Greg tells him. “We do. We have time to figure all of it out. And I’ll help you. I know it seems like it’s going to be hard to find the room, but we’ll figure it out together, okay?”

“Okay,” Mycroft agrees, because nobody could pick up so many threads without being trusted to get the end right. “Okay.”

Greg’s smile curls, then, as if he’s just remembering something. “Mycroft?”

“Yes?”

“You love me, huh?”

_It will weather everything away, eventually, and there’s almost nothing we can do on a grand scale to guard against it, because we need it to live._

“I do,” Mycroft gasps, as Greg is re-waging his war on Mycroft’s collarbone. “God help me, Gregory, I love you very, very much.”

“Everything about that sentence does things to me,” Greg moans, pushing his hips into Mycroft’s exactly once. “I love you so much.”

Mycroft has spent nearly his entire life trying to guard his heart against being wedged open at the seams, and here, at the end of all his efforts, it seems to have been in vain, because Gregory Lestrade has found his way in and made himself at home, has hung the art, straightened the books, dusted the windows, folded the quilts.

“You’re essential,” he tells Greg, who smiles. 

“You think so,” he huffs. “Remember that article you were reading me last week?”

“Which?” Mycroft frowns, quite certain that while he lays no claim to a broader understanding of the intricacies of intimate relationships, he knows at least that for most people - Gregory Lestrade included - there is little to no room for comparative economics.

“The one out of New Scientist. You know, ‘ _there is a universe in every atom, so there are millions of universes in each of us’_?”

“Yes,” Mycroft answers slowly, feeling as if every breath is coming miles apart. “It’s a lovely thought.”

“Yeah. And I’ve been thinking about that all week. Thinking about you. All your atoms, all my atoms. All our universes. Just… I think we might, you know. I think we might fit. You and me. And of everything in the world to help me figure it out, I can’t believe I have New Scientist to fuckin’ thank.” 

Greg is blushing so prettily that Mycroft thinks he might be tempted to have him, here and now, over the back of the sofa, if his own heart hadn’t stopped. “Indeed,” he breathes, voice reedy and heart incredulous, bringing his hand to the side of Greg’s face. “My goodness, Gregory, I wish I had the _words_ to tell you how very essential I find you.”

“So what I’m hearing you say is, you think we fit too,” Greg teases, before Mycroft kisses him quiet, thinking of water and atoms and years and universes; thinking of Greg, introducing him at Christmas parties; thinking of how life is so very, very long, and how Greg is so very, very warm. He thinks of what is essential - _and we need it to live_ \- and he breathes in, around the smell of Greg, all mints and aftershave and leather jackets and laundry detergent, and then he breathes out, just as Greg nips at his lower lip, and he thinks: _is it really so bad, then, to be shaped as the water flows over you?_

“Ah!” Greg gasps, as he pulls away from Mycroft, breath heavy and hair wild. “Jesus, I didn’t mean to bite you. Little rusty.” He blushes again and Mycroft sighs because this precious man is absolutely going to destroy him.

He says as much out loud, and Greg smiles. “Nah. I’ll take good care of you. That’s what I do for the things I love.”

_Not nearly so bad, then_ , Mycroft thinks, with the great relief of someone who has finally been wrenched open, only to be find that it feels much more like being uncovered, _to be shaped._


End file.
